Curable Presidential Conditions

I had a thought this morning as I was making coffee. We’ve had eight presidents who died in office. However, with modern medicine, six of them would have survived.

William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia a month after taking office. It’s very likely he would have been cured with anti-biotics. In fact, he probably would have been treated with antibiotics and would not have developed penumonia.

Zachary Taylor had something of a mystery illness, but it seems to have been some variety of stomach disturbance that could have been treated.

James Garfield was assassinated — but he died two and a half months after he was shot, not from the wounds, but from the infection that he got from physicians probing with their dirty fingers for the bullet. He most certainly would have survived.

William McKinley was assassinated, but he came through surgery just fine. He died of an infection eight days later. Basically, he was in no worse shape than Reagan was in 1981.

Warren Harding (above) clearly had a heart condition and was heading in the direction of a heart attack in ways that are unmistakable. His physicians would have made him stop smoking, stop eating — he gained about thirty pounds in office — and go on medication. He might have needed a bypass, but he wouldn’t have died in office.

Franklin Roosevelt was in grave health around the time of his 1944 re-election. He was in heart failure, and his blood pressure was insanely high — something like 300 over 160. In those days they had no way of treating him. These days his cholesterol and his blood pressure would have been brought into line years before, and he would have been given medication to clear out the fluid in his lungs. He might not have seen 80, but he would have stood a better than even chance of getting through four years.

Only Lincoln and Kennedy were beyond the reach of medical science.

Had these men lived, it would have been a different country. Had Taylor lived, for example, the Civil War might have been fought ten years earlier. Had McKinley lived there might never have been a President Theodore Roosevelt. Had FDR lived, it would have been a different post-war landscape. All these examples are tantalizing, in the sense that things might have been better, or they might have been worse. Only in the case of Kennedy and Lincoln, who couldn’t have been treated, does it seem that the country would have been unambiguously better had they lived. (Definitely with Lincoln.) With the other guys, you can argue about it forever.